There are some who love drones and others who don’t. Put at least one cranky crocodile firmly in the “don’t” category. In the below video, watch as the clearly irritated croc sinks its teeth into a pesky drone with just one chomp.
The drone was capturing footage for a documentary called “Crocodile Territory” for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (aka ABC News) when it got too close to a saltwater crocodile at the Charles Darwin Wildlife Park in Australia. Yes, you might want to nominate this drone for the Darwin Awards after seeing the footage below.
“I set the drone up over a small lagoon at Crocodylus Park, and all the crocs were really skittish,” the drone’s operator Dane Hirst explained later.
“But there was one crocodile in particular that was holding its ground and really eyeballing the drone. So, I thought, great, I’ll use this fellow, he’s in a stationary spot. I can get some decent shots of him. I lined the drone up and moved over the top of him, and as I was doing that I looked up towards the lagoon and saw a crocodile vertical out of the water and heard the great clamping noise of a crocodile’s jaws coming together.”
When Hirst looked up, the drone was gone. You can probably guess what happened to it.
As you’ll see in the video, the plastic and metal drone didn’t sit too well with the croc and they were able to retrieve it later – teeth marks and all – after the reptile spit it up. Fortunately for the crocodile, the drone didn’t go up in smoke after it bit down as happened to an alligator recently in the Florida Everglades.
